Mass Incarceration in Louisiana: Profit Motive, ICE, and Our Opposition to the National Guard In New Orleans
When addressing mass incarceration in Louisiana, we have to take an analysis of the history of racism, class structure, and the for-profit economy that we are bound by. New Orleans was founded in 1718. In the last 307 years, all we’ve caught was hell from colonization: 145 years of slavery, 87 years of Jim Crow and segregation, and 61 years of wage-slavery and mass incarceration.
FROM THE PLANTATION TO THE PENITENTIARY
There were 12 years of Reconstruction after the Civil War, in which all of its promises were hollowed and made void—especially as it pertained to land reform and economic empowerment. The plantation owners defeated it, and the formerly enslaved became sharecroppers. Modern policing grew directly out of slave patrols and post–Civil War “Black Codes” designed to control the movement, labor, and freedom of formerly enslaved people. These systems criminalized Black life to funnel people into convict leasing and prison labor, ensuring white elites maintained economic dominance after slavery’s formal abolition.
Michael from PJI showing us the mask used in Nitrogen Hypoxia executions.
This policing and prison system has intensified and become even more punitive, because it’s becoming increasingly profit-driven. Today, prisoners in Louisiana are part of a hidden workforce linked to several popular food brands. These incarcerated men and women—working for pennies or nothing at all—are forced into agricultural and industrial labor that feeds directly into the supply chains of global corporations.
At Louisiana’s infamous Angola prison, once a vast slave plantation, men toil in fields under armed guards, raising cattle and crops that ultimately make their way into products sold by McDonald’s, Walmart, Whole Foods, Tyson Foods, and Cargill, among others.
Similar arrangements exist across the country: Hickman’s Family Farms uses prisoners to supply eggs to Costco and Kroger; Koch Foods used prison labor in poultry plants where workers have been killed on the job; and commodity giants like Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, and Louis Dreyfus have purchased millions in crops from prison farms. Even exported goods like rice, milk, and almonds are tied to prison labor—meaning that U.S. agribusiness profits from a workforce denied basic protections while decrying forced labor abroad.
This is not a mere historical echo of slavery but a continuation of capitalist accumulation through racialized coercion. The 13th Amendment’s exception clause legalized a system in which labor can still be violently extracted under the guise of punishment. Corporations reap enormous profits by accessing a “shadow workforce” with no bargaining power, no labor rights, and no ability to unionize. What is presented as “rehabilitation” or “repayment of debt to society” is, in reality, surplus value extraction under conditions more brutal than most wage labor.
ICE AND GEO GROUP
The prison-industrial complex—fed by mass incarceration policies disproportionately targeting Black communities since the 1970s—functions as a modern system of convict leasing, transferring public bodies into private profit. Angola’s fields, where enslaved Africans once picked cotton, are now worked by incarcerated Black men who produce wealth for corporations. This is capitalism laid bare! Slavery never ended; it was restructured to fit within the law, ensuring that corporations could continue to profit from human bondage under the guise of criminal justice.
This is being exacerbated by the racist billionaire class. Angola is now being used to imprison undocumented immigrants, with police forces being funded to maintain it. According to a new law signed in July 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has received $75 billion in additional funding over four years for detention and enforcement. This marks a dramatic increase, as the annual ICE budget is expected to triple, from around $8 billion to roughly $28 billion, to fund new detention centers, hire 10,000 new agents, and expand other enforcement operations.
To add insult to injury, the U.S. Attorney General is Pam Bondi, a former lobbyist for the private prison corporation GEO Group. Coincidentally, GEO Group holds contracts with ICE to detain immigrants, and the company has recently secured new and modified contracts to expand its detention capacity. The only minority creating an economic crisis for the working class in the United States is the billionaire class. And while they shift the blame onto immigrants, they are in fact profiting off criminalizing them with our tax dollars.
It is clear that the current punitive justice system is for profit. It cannot be reformed—it has to be abolished and replaced with a more restorative system. The way policing occurs has to be abolished as well. Policing has to be taken out of the hands of elites. For them, the police exist to protect the state apparatus of oppression and state property. Policing should be planned by the people who live in a given community. Instead of the police force as it operates today, it should be replaced with well-trained community safety teams. These teams will emphasize intervention, mediation, and arrest when necessary—but arrest and prison won’t be the first option. We have to abolish the for-profit prison system as it is today and make it about actual rehabilitation. Depending on the crime, once a person has served their time and has been rehabilitated, they should be released with the full rights that every citizen enjoys.
CMN OPPOSITION TO THE NATIONAL GUARD IN NEW ORLEANS
In a state with the highest incarceration rate in the world, more punitive measures are not the solution. Given this analysis, Critical Mass NOLA is diametrically opposed to the National Guard being sent to New Orleans to police our communities. It will only intensify the racist, vulture-capitalist system that already destroys our communities. Instead of spending billions of dollars to criminalize our communities, those billions can be used to fund resources that will actually turn the tide of the 307 years of colonization that has stripped us of our humanity.
Our tax dollars can be used to fund universal healthcare, redevelop empty lots into affordable housing, create a workforce to restore our wetlands, and create a public school system in which teachers are given just compensation and smaller classroom sizes.
As we enter election year, it’s important to know what candidates think about the issues that we are concerned about. As it pertains to Critical Mass NOLA, a few have mentioned bicycle infrastructure, many have not. We’re not too bothered by it, because we know that elected officials are controlled by their campaign contributors. It is the business class that funds them, and that is who they truly represent. True change rarely comes about by voting. We would never tell you not to vote—damn near 130 people were killed on Canal and O’Keefe advocating for the right to vote in the New Orleans Massacre of 1866. People actually died organizing for us to have that right. We should therefore exercise it every opportunity we’re given.
We do want to emphasize, however, that the only true changes that have occurred in this country were due to grassroots organizing. This organizing has led to reforms, but with every advance, the two-party system has found a way to undermine them. While we have the right to vote, the state undermines that right with gerrymandering. And now they’re coupling that by regressing civil rights advancements with attacks on DEI.
THE FAILURE OF THE TWO PARTY SYSTEM
We can’t make the mistake of placing the blame squarely on Republicans. The problem is the overall two-party system. Democrats will side with progressive causes so long as it doesn’t meddle with the accumulation of wealth. The Democratic Party is a capitalist party, and amassing capital via extracting surplus value from the working class is their principal objective.
This is where the labor movement in the United States has derailed. Labor is unified with the Democrats, whose objective is the exploitation of workers. There’s no chance the Democrats will help the labor movement replace their party with a people-planned economy built for the planet rather than for quarterly profits that drive climate collapse.
Take for example the escalation of the drug war in the 1980s and 1990s, which coincided with aggressive policing in Black neighborhoods in New Orleans. Arrest rates for Black men skyrocketed—by 1990, Orleans Parish had one of the highest per-capita incarceration rates in the country. Democratic leaders such as former District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. championed harsh prosecutions under “tough on crime” policies, disproportionately targeting Black residents while drug use rates were similar across races.
The 1994 Crime Bill, signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, expanded “three strikes” laws that mandated life sentences for repeat offenders, even for non-violent drug crimes. This policy, alongside mandatory minimums, fueled an era of mass imprisonment that disproportionately targeted Black communities. Far from being solely a Republican project, the Democrats were equally guilty, embracing “tough on crime” politics to win votes while devastating generations of Black families.
“YOU CAN’T HAVE CAPITALISM WITHOUT RACISM”
Under the first Reconstruction (after the Civil War), land reform and voting rights were denied us. Under the second Reconstruction (the Civil Rights Movement), we were given voting rights only for the state to engage in gerrymandering. In this Third Reconstruction, we have to come to realize that reforms are not enough. The entire system needs to be replaced. As long as profit motive trumps cooperation, we will either be reduced to serfs or to slaves.
Malcolm X stated that, “you can’t have capitalism without racism.” Capitalism is the problem. Fred Hampton also reminded us that, “We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire. But we say you put out fires best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're going to fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with black capitalism. You fight capitalism with socialism.”
In the interim, as we organize toward a Third Reconstruction, we want retrials for those convicted under non-unanimous juries. We demand an end to experimental executions by way of nitrogen hypoxia, we oppose live surveillance technology being used in our city, and we want the passage of the Fair Chance Act. However, as in former movements when our advances have been outmaneuvered, we want an entirely different system. Once the police are replaced with well-trained community safety teams, we also want to see the abolishment of the prison system as it stands.
We work for these reforms in hope that they, of course, get passed. We want alleviation from injustice for our people. These efforts also allow us to build solidarity and raise consciousness about these issues among the working class as a whole. It is this solidarity and coalition-building that we are developing to organize a force that will transform the nature of incarceration and bring it into the broader sphere of struggle.
All of our issues are interrelated, because we are all working to replace a system that puts profit above economic rights and a healthy planet.
Join us, ride with us, and be a part of reversing the 307 years of oppression that colonization has inflicted on New Orleans.
In Solidarity,
Eric Gabourel